Prior to seeing Then She Found Me, I heedlessly referred to it as “that Helen Hunt movie” and cynically prejudged it as yet another celebrity pet project that was sure to be a misguided and perhaps freewheeling bore. Well, I stand corrected: I absolutely love the film, which was written and directed by the Oscar-winning actress (yeah, I forgot she won one, too), adapted quite loosely from Elinor Lipman’s novel of the same name.

And hopefully you won’t hold it against me, especially if you haven’t seen it. The strange thing about seeing a film like Then She Found Me at SXSW is that it doesn’t seem hip enough for the festival, despite the ironic fact that many movies screening this year were about nerds, geeks and other sorts of outcast. Nobody wants to hear you say, “hey, that Helen Hunt movie is actually really good.” Between that and telling people that I love Bette Midler again (not randomly; she’s in the film), I felt like a stranger in a strange world the rest of my time in Austin.

The most interesting thing about Then She Found Me is that it’s set up like a women’s melodrama. Helen Hunt plays April, a 39-year-old schoolteacher with a biological clock that’s long gone off. She’s just married a fellow schoolteacher (Matthew Broderick), one that’s hardly a catch, possibly just to have a baby already. Unfortunately, he quickly abandons her. Rather than playing the moment too dramatically, though, Hunt slips in a little black comedy. “It can’t get any worse,” she says. And then her mother dies.

April was adopted, and now that both her surrogate parents have passed on, she receives an invitation to meet her supposed real mom, a daytime talk show host April has never heard of named Bernice Graves (Midler). Bernice tells how she was a young manicurist who was knocked up by Steve McQueen, but it’s revealed to be the first of many subsequent lies.

Meanwhile, April begins a relationship with Frank (Colin Firth), the also recently dumped father of one of her students. And yet she’s conflicted about how she feels about her husband, who is now cowardly living with his mother but is having doubts about leaving the marriage. A whole lot more melodrama fodder comes next, none of which I’ll spoil, though if you’re familiar with women’s films you might easily guess.

Still, I wouldn’t say Then She Found Me is a predictable film. Story-wise, perhaps, but not necessarily narratively. At some point around the end of the second act, I was thinking to myself: Everything in this film is done just right. Everything is in it that I could hope for. But not in a predictable way. In a satisfying, I don’t even know what I want to happen until it happens sort of way.

All of this is what I scribbled down in my notes, and what I meant by it is that the film feels real and not labored, regardless of whether or not it’s progression superficially seems expected. Each scene just retrospectively seems to have been anticipated due to it’s actually being the natural way for the dialogue and events to transpire.

As a result of this naturalness, or at least coinciding with it, Hunt manages to get some great performances out of her two major co-stars. Midler is the funniest she’s been in decades, which is interesting since Then She Found Me exists somewhere in between, though way outside, her wilder, broader ’80s comedies, like Ruthless People, and the light-humor-infused-melodrama of Beaches. As for Firth, he’s playing near to his usual stone-faced persona, but his character here is a little more damaged, a lot more complicated and at times he comes off as both his most attractive and his most scariest.

Hunt, too, is superb, especially considering she won the Oscar for a lesser performance. She and her character are a bit odd, though, in that neither seems to really know where they are in the film. As if, like me, they are each a stranger in a strange world. The feeling of distance in Hunt/April is really a good thing, however, in that she really is like a stand-alone creature in a place she can’t quite make sense of. Like she’s always outside of herself, looking in on her life, which she has trouble accepting as real. Don’t we all have those moments where we feel like outsiders in our own being? It explains the black comic perspective, that uncomfortable laughter when things are at their worst, and it explains why April is ultimately one of the rare woman characters in cinema to really make choices that are actually choices, good or bad, tests of possibility, than the normal motions and paths.

Then She Found Me is a smart, mature film that allows a certain freedom for the way its characters act, react, talk to each other and merely be. It’s not quite perfect, particularly in its final act, but it is definitely something to be proud to have enjoyed. I only wish that my colleagues could take my word for it and stop being as heedless and cynical as I had been.

Fortunately, THINKFilm will release the film to the public, which will hopefully be less prejudice, on April 25 (in NYC; Los Angeles gets it a week later).